


theater of air

by ninamazing



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, just smoosh your faces together you jerks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:28:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninamazing/pseuds/ninamazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits and pieces under 500 words, not necessarily in the same universe, for general to mature audiences. First up:  Felicity's the big spoon. Latest:  Longer ficlet about allowing partners the dignity of their choices. (Title from Mary Oliver's "Starlings in Winter.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sleep now

He doesn't sleep, not for more than three or four hours at a stretch, at best. Finally his life and his time are up to him, but rest still doesn't come, and when it comes it doesn't stay.

But his universe has certainly turned into something different since kissing Felicity, since walking her back to her apartment and hearing her key in the door and watching her turn back to him with a smile, streaks of light caught in the tops of her glasses.

Now in the dark she wraps herself around him from behind, pulling him close enough to cradle his head to her chest. Her knuckles stroke softly against his cheek for a few moments before he takes her hand to his mouth and kisses it. The sound of the two of them breathing lulls him into a calm that feels like a childhood dream, sun and fresh air and laughter, before the world became a terrible place. He's asleep before he knows it, safe in her arms, and it lasts for twelve hours.


	2. the taste of inevitability

She’s all over his thoughts, but most of the time in a sensible way, like because she’s in front of his face explaining a fatal weakness in the plans of a criminal overlord. It sounds like work, it looks like work, and as long as he doesn’t lean in too close it smells like work too.

It’s not going to last long, he knows, not if all his flaws can help it. The worst part is that he can’t tell what’s really making him sick, the terror that should be keeping him in check or the lust looping around it, an even greater threat. His protectiveness for her is a double-edged sword; he has her back, and there behind her back he’s imagining putting his mouth all over her warm and willing body, of earning her love until she follows him right into Hell and falls, falls, falls.

The mirror image of him kissing her is him trying desperately to breathe life back into her body and knowing he’s already failed. He’s on his knees in her office, listening to the breathy note of her post-orgasmic giggle, and then someone tilts the camera in his mind and everything is silent but his sobs and even though his head is still buried in her lap he can’t feel her at all, not one single tendril of heat.

He hates himself so much.


	3. dangerous and noble things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MIT class rings are colloquially known as "brass rats" because they all have beavers on them. Beavers are nature's engineers, and hence our mascot! Felicity's ring would look [like this](http://web.mit.edu/2009/ring/design.shtml). (Fun fact: You can use the celestrium ones to open beer bottles. Gold is too soft a metal for that, though.)

She is feeling braver and braver, these days. When she catches sight of him with his head in his hands in her usual chair by the monitors, she doesn't turn on her heel and slink away. She takes a deep breath, counts down from three, and keeps walking. He doesn't move to greet her, but when she reaches him and puts her hand on his shoulder he sighs, letting something go at least.

"Hey, elbows off the table," she jokes, just for something to say, but now he looks at her, and it's possible he's cracked a smile. The chair wheels rolling on the floor sound too loud in the cavernous foundry.

"Felicity," he says softly. He shouldn't be able to elevate her heart rate so much just by saying her name and taking one of her hands in his, but of course he is, and he does. He strokes the skin under her brass rat with the pad of his finger, and she could kick him for how damnably hot he always is.

"Wouldn't your life be better without me?" he asks in the same quiet tone, so it takes her an extra second to parse.

"What? No." She lets out a frustrated breath. "We keep doing this. Safer isn't better. Necessarily."

She keeps her fingers curled around his, so he can't escape from this too easily, and incredibly he doesn't.

"No, it's ... _safer_."

"What does that mean to you, exactly? 'Cause to me it means I'm in danger of losing my mind to boredom. Of doing _nothing_. A meaningless existence."

"A normal life is meaningless? The way you were, before—we met?"

"No. No, it wasn't. But this is more."

She brings her other hand over to join their linked ones, and the two of them stare at their fingers for a moment.

"This is more, Oliver. I didn't jump out of a plane or bomb a building or hack into a prison for nothing. And I won't go backwards."

"I can't go backwards." Oliver speaks like the words are heavy. Above them, the heating system cycles on and a dull roar comes through the vents on the floor. "I feel like I'm ..." He swallows. "Stuck, on a speeding train that's going to crash. I keep seeing you—suffering—because of me. I couldn't keep myself away from you and there will be a price to pay."

She wonders if he can hear them in his own voice, echoes of past ultimatums rearing their threatening heads. But there is no supervillain striving to keep them apart now, not unless there really is a demon of bad dates that has it out for her.

"Why won't you believe this is a real choice for me?" she asks. "You know Marie Curie died from radiation exposure? She probably would have lived longer if she hadn't spent any time around radium or polonium. But she's the reason we know about radioactivity. She won two Nobel prizes. And she had a husband. A partner."

"So she's someone I should have heard of."

"Ha. I don't want to know if you're kidding. Look, Oliver, people are always going to be after us. I was stalked long before I even knew you, but I found ways to keep going to class and making friends, because I wanted to. I would use everything I have not to let them win. I learned a long time ago that I can't torture myself with fear about things that could happen to you. If I did I'd be too overwhelmed with fright to give you directions. To have your back. And if someday somehow the worst happens, I want to know that I did as much as I possibly could with this life. I want to know I never turned away from you."

It's more exhausting than she anticipated, letting all of that out, but it's also a relief; her shoulders feel lighter. Oliver sits in silence, staring at her hands.

"You were so alone for so long," she continues. "Don't you want company? There's nowhere else I'd rather be, I swear."

She's afraid she's run out of words, but for the next few hours, they don't need any more.


End file.
